Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone.

Lendruil, thank you very much for letting us know. We definitely leave the thread open so other players in the same situation can benefit from your solution. To the rest, thanks for your contributions!

Hello Enzo.

Thanks for letting us know. Since the question seems closed, we proceed to close the thread.

Shanna.4762:

If the only options at the end of the day were that Anet has to make the concession to keep Cantha uniformally one Asian culture moving forward, or never have it then I bet most of us would accept that concession even though it sucks that they have to be “sensitive” to those issues for political reasons. There’s a lot that goes on that we never hear about and never will hear about, and have really no right to hear about at this point in time in regards to the business and relations portion of ArenaNet and the game. As Josh said, many of the developers would love to return to Cantha, I bet many of them would rather do it sooner than later, but there’s probably a lot they have to do in order to move forward with Cantha and I sincerely hope they will and if there’s a way for them to make it happen I am sure they will.

That’s a very good way of putting it. I certainly don’t know where, when, or how the decision was made. I’m just a map artist. So I’m not in a position to critique it. I also don’t know the extent of the decision. For all I know it was some producer in Korea who doesn’t work there any more and the next time it’s brought up there will be no problem. Or maybe there will be one or two tweaks that will fix the problem. Who knows?

Tuggernutz.2897:

void.6705:

Michael.4791:

void.6705:

I also was banned for being accused of botting…. I would like to see any records of me botting or anything like that yes I run the same zones a lot but I am always on my account… I havent receieved any emails or anything to let me know exactly why I was banned

Write a support ticket and ask them there.

Oh I did trust me they heard from me

Michael.4791 assumes people don’t make tickets before they post on the forum.

Many people do not understand the process and believe that posting here, or listing their guild members’ or friends’ names here, will get a review started. That is not the case, so reminding folks to contact Support by filing a ticket through the “Ask a Question” tab on that linked page is in fact a very helpful thing to do. That should actually be the first step in getting an issue resolved, although it’s fine to post here after the ticket is submitted (and especially if the issue has extended 3 days or longer). Whether posting in the main forum or in the Tickets for Review thread, please always provide me with the 12-digit ticket number as a starting point in researching the issue.

Thanks.

I am sorry that this is happening, and I want, first, to point you to a post that I made earlier today, because while the form of messaging may not be clear, I believe that this situation does apply to some of you posting in this thread (or your friends or guildies). Here’s the post.

I don’t mean to appear to be making excuses for our errors. We have made them, and we do make them, and I agree with you that we need to reduce the number of false positives. That is something I will spend my tomorrow looking into, you have my word on it.

Tuggernutz.2897:

Michael.4791:

Don’t post on the forum – it will not help.
Write a ticket and ask for review – that will help.

Doesn’t help if they don’t respond to your ticket….

Some tickets are prioritized above others. A log-in issue — “I’ve been banned and I didn’t do anything” or “I cannot remember my password” — is of higher priority than "My name was blocked and I’m not happy.

I don’t mean to single you out, but it’s plain truth that some situations deserve more immediate action than others.

Having said that a team member usually responds within hours, a day or two at most. And we have a sticky thread at the top of this Account Support Forum for anyone who has waited 3 days or more.

Fresh fruit is not OP, you simply need to counter it with a silly walk.

We decided to remove them from the spawn points because far too many people were just bouncing into WvW so they could use all the services there for extended periods of time without actually going out and fighting in the map, which just exacerbated the queue issues for many servers.

At the same time, we were also looking to make the personnel upgrade path for keeps a little more enticing for players, so moving the bankers out of the safe areas and into the upgrade path was a way for us to tackle both issues at once.

Yes, people can still use the crafting stations in their server’s borderland map to reach their bank, but we consider that to be a bit of ‘home field advantage’ if you will, and so far those haven’t seemed to create a bunch of traffic that isn’t interested in just camping out in the safe zone.

Do you “Fast cast ground targeting” turned on in Options? If so, it’s trying to fire the cannon at your mouse cursor. Turning it off will give you a target marker when you fire the cannon, so you can manually place it.

Mystic.5934:

One thing I have wondered:
if someone sells 10,000 gems for gold, then someone else buys 10,000 gems with gold, will the gem->gold price be the same after as before? (is it the same increase as decrease?)

also, I’d like to point out (I’m not sure if Anet has thought of and accounted for this):
if you sell 100 gems you get (as an example) 1.5g. if you buy 1.5g worth of gems, you will only get like 85 gems (for example). However, when someone sells 100 gems for 1.5g, the exchange rate goes down so the next 100 gems may only give 1.499g. and that 1.5g would then buy 85.01 gems. If this is the case, then it’s only a matter of quantity before it’s possible to make instant profit from buying/selling gems. example: sell 100,000 gems and get 1,500g, then price of gems goes down to 100 gems for 1g, then you buy 100,000 gems for 1,150g (I’m assuming it costs 15% more to buy gems than selling them will bring)
This was an exploit in Fable and many other games. I would hate for it to exist here as well. It is very possible to have less simplistic mechanics that make this impossible.

I thought of this before release, it won’t work; although I highly encourage you to give it a shot

Pyrial.2917:

More Jon Peters and less Jon Sharp

+1

Great post, some great points in here.

We know a lot of this, but a lot of times we can’t speak to specific plans to fix things. We also know full well what’s good in the meta (or OP). We sometimes just can’t reveal what we’re thinking about balance until our lists go final.

A lot of people assume that silence = ignorance, and often times, that’s not the case.

Great read! Enjoyed it.

I have no way of knowing what happened here. You can submit a report, but I don’t know that you have any evidence that this took place, and it feels as if it may not be worthwhile to investigate at this late date.

Perhaps the notes in this thread will help you. I suspect the situations are similar.

I believe you will hear from the team very soon.

When an account is blocked for an offensive name, the account is given a 72-hour suspension. At the end of the suspension, the account holder will need to rename any censored characters before the characters can be accessed. (Appeals are seldom successful and they are unnecessary because the player can handle the renames when the suspension expires.)

Now, if someone continues to use offensive names, the suspension period becomes longer and usually the player is not given the opportunity to rename the character but instead a support team member renames the character.

So as you can see, it’s best to be careful in all name choices and especially if you have been actioned for an offensive name in the past.

Yeah, that’s my mistake, sorry. Somehow I missed these guys when bankers were changed from being always available at safe points to being part of the upgrade path at keeps, which is why they are only in a couple of the maps.

Since the bankers are only supposed to be available at keeps after an upgrade, we’ll be removing them from the safe areas in a future build.

Victory.2879:

The problem with JP’s in wvw is they take up queue spots for people who want to do wvw and help their server win the wvw.

Ok. Thanks for the cogent explanation. I’ll look into counter-arguments and pass this along to someone who has the power to actually do something about it.

Kruhljak.2705:

@Kraggy: What you saw was a bot teleporting to the node you were near, using it, then teleporting off the next node in their circuit. This teleporting stuff is actually a sort of hacked trick, not something the character is actually doing legitimately.

As you’ve found out, friending them in order to report them is the easiest method to deal with them. If I see someone appear out of nowhere at a node, I immediately screenshot it, refer to it to get the exact spelling so there’s no mistaken identity issue, friend them, then report them for botting. I leave them friended until I haven’t seen them for quite a while. Because bots will tend to remain functioning until they’re forcibly removed, I assume not seeing them for several days means they’ve been dealt with. This sometimes takes upwards of a week, though. I’ve reported perhaps 50 bots of various types, and most of them have disappeared (only the most recent ones I have in my friends list are still hopping around).

I’d say that these reports are working. Those that handle them don’t really need too many details from you, as I believe they just review whatever metrics they keep on how the character’s been being “played” either in general or around the time of the report datestamp.

To the last question, you can report them by targeting them and right-clicking on their portrait (top center of your screen). There’s an option to report them from there, though as noted with regard to mining bots, you’re unlikely to be able to do all that while they’re still in front of you. The method I noted above removes the issue since a screenshot takes less than a second and the info’s there until you have some time to deal with it.

My advice is to report them every time you see them, even if you’ve already reported them (assuming some reasonable time has passed since the last report). The more distinct reports, the more likely they’ll be noticed. I expect ANet uses a weighted priority system to determine what order to address each suspected bot; more reports, higher priority.

Valuable comments, Kruhljak, and thank you.

Kraggy.4169:

Tell me, does using the ‘report cheating’ really work?

Thing is, as a relative noob I saw several time characters appear at a node, farm it then log off. I asked on here if these were bots and was told ‘yes’, report them.

The only way I have found to do this is to ‘friend’ them, then use Report. However, there is nowhere for me to describe the activity at all. Thus, my ‘report’ consists of me simply naming them as a ‘bot’: there’s no evidence collection, no information is asked for at all.

Are these ‘reports’ REALLY taken notice of? I took a screenshot, simply to be able to remember the character’s name, but that wouldn’t be evidence since obviously faking screenshots is easy, so I’m left wondering just how useful this reporting scheme is.

Also, if this is considered useful by Anet, why isn’t this ‘report’ option available simply by targetting the bot, instead of having to try to remember a name that is often deliberately designed to make remembering something seen for only a few seconds difficult?

Yep Kraggy, it really works. We have team members reviewing the in-game reports pretty much around the clock. Player reports are very helpful to us: either the in-game report system or putting locations of concern in this thread.

Thanks for asking!

SacuraShadow — We are all on board with making sure that players we action are indeed guilty of the infractions they’re being flagged for!

A lot of times, someone who is flagged for botting was actually hacked and the hacker used the account for cheating. The account owner gets the message and it’s a little scary. It’s also a double-whammy of hurt: Get hacked and get “accused of cheating” is how it appears. Well, both happened, but with research, we’re able to figure out that the account owner was innocent of cheating and we help him/her get back on the account and of course remove the flag for cheating (like botting).

Long explanation, sorry. We’ll take care of you boyfriend. Just ask him to follow up on the ticket and explain that he was not involved in cheating, and the agent can look into the situation to see if there was hacking+hacker cheating involved.

I think this will get sorted pretty quickly.

Sinsko.9342:

While I personally have never experienced anything where I required a support ticket, I can say that even just getting feedback from ACTUAL reps from ArenaNet here on the forums is actually pretty easy.

While ArenaNet comes across as having pretty ‘strict’ guidelines, they are just involved and active, unlike ummmmm every other online company. Pretty much encouraging the players to shy away from trolls and agony that plagues pretty much any community out there.

I’m glad that you got your account back and although it took a few hoops… I understand why they do it the way they do. What is great is that even with your support ticket.. that you’re e-mailing an actual human being… not getting the canned automated responses the first 3 times to filter out people. For me, as a customer… this speaks VOLUMES!

Although I don’t always agree with the moderator warnings I seem to get on the forums (lol), I really respect ArenaNet as a company, and how engaged with their customers they actually are.

Thank you for your day-brightening comments, Sinsko. We really try to be accessible and communicative. (And that’s why I so want to work to improve the messaging that folks get in situations such as the ones that Ritz mentioned.)

There are two ways to interpret that statement. If you were not guilty of racist chat, but were only making a harmless comment about how a certain ethnic group created delicious foodstuffs, then you can discuss the matter with support.

As far as I know, the defend events should count towards the achievements. I’ll have QA look into this and see if there’s something funky going on.

Mint Jelly.2569:

An account I know of was permanently banned recently, and its owner allowed me to have the old character names if I wanted (since they obviously weren’t going to be used), but I get a notification saying they’re still in use.

I’ve heard that banned accounts are in permanent suspension, but do the names ever get cleared up? The owner said the support ticket for the ban said the action was permanent, and the ban would not be lifted. If that’s the case, what’s the point in holding on to the data and tying up the names?

We do not free up the names because the loss of the character names is one of the by-products of getting one’s account terminated. If we were to free up the names, someone could just start a new account and use the old names. Too, if we freed up the names and later the original name-holder wanted to use them, we’d have a dispute because two players who both felt they “owned” the names.

So leaving the names locked is best.

As others have said, splitting the queue’s entirely can be bad. But it also means solo’s always play solos, and teams always play teams.

There are pro/cons to both options. We’re watching your debates/points and in the end, we will try to make the best system for the game’s health.

Sinsko.9342:

Is it a violation of TOU to be logged in both at the same time?

(Not account sharing, but sometimes need to log in to the other to check things out since the accounts are linked).

No, it is not a violation for you to be logged into both your Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 accounts, as long as they belong to you, and as long as you’re playing legitimately (or reviewing your accounts, you know, something that is not cheating )

I really encourage your brother to contact Support by filing a ticket through the “Ask a Question” tab on that linked page. They will look into this. It’s possible he was linked with botters and got caught in the sweep, but I cannot say that with certainty. (And we do not intend for that to happen, naturally! Legitimate players should be and are intended to be free to play as they desire.)

For tips on what information to provide in a ticket, please ask him to read this post because including that info will speed up the ticket for him.

synch.2980:

AimForThatFace.7814:

So if a user shared his account details you’ll be banned, how would you find out if a player has been on a website and used a power leveling service unless you seen there screen when they bought it?

Also what happens if you want to share a account with a friend so they can take in turns leveling a character is this not allowed?

Sharing an account is against the terms-of-service. So no, it’s not allowed. They’ve stated that several times on the forum, look through Gaile’s post history for some of the reasons why

As for powerleveling services, they’re not going to tell you how they identify accounts that use the services – but it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with technical means that might be used to do so.

No system is going to catch everybody, and I’m sure they’re going to err on the side of letting a few slip through rather than bring down the banhammer on someone who didn’t do anything – but why risk it?

Thanks, Synch — this pretty much sums it up.

AimForThatFace.7814:

Also what happens if you want to share a account with a friend so they can take in turns leveling a character is this not allowed?

No, it is not allowed.

Jon’s summation is a pretty good approximation of the general goals we have for this. We’d like to devise a system that allows good solo queuing while also helping to form teams and build the playerbase. The system Jon outlined means that most solo queue players are usually fighting against other solo queues, and only go “up” to 2 and 3 man queue’s when their bracket is empty. Same thing with 5 man teams – they will usually fight other 5 man teams.

With this system, it also means that we couldn’t track solo queue rating vs group rating. This is a drawback we know about.

We’re not entirely opposed to a solo queue system, it just comes with many pros and cons, and we’re being careful to make sure we do what’s best for the player base and growing the game (both for new/casual players, and hardcore players).

As with everything else we’re doing, we’re looking to do the best thing for the game – if something’s not working, we will fix it if it’s better for the game to do so.

You have updated your ticket approximately 30 times since you submitted it yesterday. And now you’re posting the exact same content here. Please stop doing this! Your tickets has been reviewed and responded to now.

You chose an offensive name. It was racist and it used “creative spelling” to mask a nasty word. The fact you were able to create the name does not reflect negatively on us, for it’s impossible to block every single possible offensive name when people are intent on using them.

Our policies are clear and the outcomes are explained on our Legal Documents page. Your warning was in the UA and RoC that you accepted. At the point you breach the agreements, you have earned a time-out and that is what you’ve been given. You will be allowed back in the game when your 72-hour suspension expires. Choose a new name, and choose wisely, because flailing out with another offensive name will result in a more extended period of time out, as explained in the Conduct Breaches and Outcomes, linked on that page.

This should be fixed in the next content update. I found a fairly obscure bug where Brogun would stall if he died to a condition immediately after the escort event ended.

Yuki.4190:

I also have this issue with a few extras to it…..

Not only is my email shown in the guild tab, I also have the problem of losing all information in the guild tab. It will show no players online and I am unable to do any maintenance to the guild.

I also lose all ability to use my chat. I can not see any Guild/Party or Whisper that may be in coming or out going. I get the error 42:1000:9001:4105:101 (which I know another member posted a picture of earlier)

The strange thing for me is it only happens in the evening! I can play all day time and it will work fine, but towards 6pm (uk time) I get the error and the above kicks in.

I run AVG and have the “Guild Wars 2 Special” option so I’m unsure if it’s a firewall or security issue like the error message tells me.

I would suggest that you submit a ticket or, at the least, post in the Technical Support Forum. The error code you described is monitored on that forum, and I think you may find answers there. If not, the TS Team is more than willing to help!

There are numerous detection systems in place in addition to frequent player reports. There’s no rule against someone leveling up quickly, but there is a rule against sharing accounts and the use of disallowed services. First, do keep in mind that people say silly things, and that this may not have happened. Secondly, did you report this player so the team could take a look?

kineticdamage.6279:

Pure target audience strategy. They saw how westerners rejected Asian elements during Mists of Pandaria development, so they took it as a business rule and wanted to surf on the rejection. That is speculation of course, but it is so obvious …

That’s not what happened. This went down long before anyone even know MOP was coming. It was simply a cultural consideration.

@ Oni: Not your fault, we talked about so many things, and I didn’t explain it well.

I’m watching all the threads right now about solo q.

@ Felivear, something like that.

We won’t show your rating #, but you’ll know your rank position.

First, let’s be clear: This is decidedly not an account issue.

Secondly: Thirty seconds? You’re joking, right? You can’t base a review on what someone tells you a program does. You must dig down and find that out directly. Therefore, “vetting” a program could take days, even weeks. And even then, the core program that appears fine can be warped into a harmful, disallowed program with the addition of malicious content after a review.

Please understand that every day, we get requests to review, approve, endorse, or publicize this site or that tool or that other utility. Now, in a world of finite resources — a reality with any development company — should we spend staff members’ time on reviewing third-party programs? How much time? How many people? Or should we invest that time instead doing what we do so well: developing new content, improving the game, fixing bugs, balancing, addressing player concerns; in other words, generally focusing our developers on… developing our game?

Given the sheer volume of stuff “out there” and based on the many requests that we receive daily — despite our making it clear we do not offer reviews, approvals, or endorsements — we could spend an entire sub-team reviewing other people’s creations to see if, perhaps, they are harmless and would be allowed by the User Agreement, Content Terms of Use, Rules of Conduct and our Copyright. (See Legal for details.)

The best thing for us to do right now is to set out our policies as clearly and concisely as possible without misdirecting a potentially-increasing number of staff members onto projects that belong to someone else.

All that could change in the future, but for now, that’s how things stand.

I think you may have misunderstood.

We are not planning on showing your RATING, but you will know exactly where you rank in relation to other players – you will know your rank, but you will not know the actual #. Other games have done something similar.

You will know your “worth” or how “skilled” you are, you just won’t need a # to show it, you will have a placement in relation to other players.

Sorry I didn’t explain it better in the SOTG.

Rytz — I am sorry you had difficulties. And I have shared one of yoru points with the team previously: It would be better to block a purchase than to allow its completion and close the account a day or two later. Even so, I sort of wobble on the fence of “But what about those players who have to wait for a review?” I mean, when I buy something I don’t want to get a message that say, essentially, “We’re thinking about whether to let you buy or not.”

From what I understand, addressing this situation is a very significant goal of the Fraud Team and I do believe they will take steps to address this pretty soon. I will see what I can do to correct the messages that players receive. Couldn’t agree with you more than vague messages are not helpful. We fixed one this week (and have fixed others in the past) and we’ll try to find better ways of giving players accurate and updated info.

Here’s a challenge: A player buys the game, gets hacked, and the hacker uses the account in disallowed ways. Account owner comes back and sees “You’ve done something wrong” when he/she did nothing whatsoever wrong. I want us to be able to tell players, “You account was hacked and the hacker did something wrong and that’s why we need you to contact Support.” We’re moving towards that.

Lastly: Your game account and your support account are not linked, so having any sort of block on your account — from termination to suspension — does not prevent you from contacting the team via your support account. Submit a ticket using the “Ask a Question” tab on this page: http://support.guildwars2.com/. The credentials for your account can be the same — although for security reasons I recommend against that — but the accounts themselves are separate.

Farming is fine.
Grinding is ok.
The number of false positives is few, and repeated marks far fewer still, but if you’re involved, please simply contact Support and we’ll work with you to get this resolved.

I’m not in a position to give “tips on not getting blocked” as far as botting because, well, every RMT and botter out there would ask for just those details. (I am sure you are not that sort of person, DL, just explaining the challenge here.)

We don’t normally go into an area and just make a huge sweep and call everyone a “bot” so that should be some reassurance to you. I think some of the suggestions in this thread are helpful, and hope you’ll play without this weighing too heavily on your mind, knowing our greatest goal is to get people back into the game if there’s an issue, and not to kick people without reason!

Have fun out there!

Veeber, looks like this post was made about half a day ago. Can you let me know if you are still having these issues? Some issues were corrected today, and I’m hoping that you’re ok now. Thanks!

Iruwen.3164:

Not really a jumping “puzzle”,

I hate the term Jumping Puzzle. It really only applies to about 20% of them. I’ve always called them Jumping Challenges which covers the scope of what they offer.

Levistis.8356:

Also, I hope we’ll get to be our own characters :’(

I anticipated that most people would want to be their characters, and wouldn’t want to lose the look they’ve worked so hard to achieve, so I made sure we would not transform you into something else. Just don’t expect to be your normal size.

Thank you for the report! We’ve added this to our bug database and will be investigating a solution.

In the meantime, you should be able to work-around this issue by clicking any visible portion of the inventory overflow window UI (hiding beneath the reward splash) and bringing it on top of the other window. I hope this helps!

When you apply the sigil it pops up a warning that the item will become soulbound to you. It sounds like there’s a bug with “soulbound” not displaying afterwards.

Putting a sigil on an item will bind it to you, yes.